Just finished this on Sunday, thought I'd put it up and share it. I did a little project I call Popcorn as a tribute to the time-of-day announcement service. Here's a demo video;

BACKGROUND
Starting around 1950, you could dial 'POPCORN' anywhere in Northern California and you'd get an automated time-of-day announcement. In 2007, AT&T stopped offering the service because of decreased usage and because the equipment was no longer serviceable. I always thought it would be fun to do my own version of popcorn using different voice samples, and finally got around to putting it together. If you're curious what the original popcorn sounded like, here's a sample mp3.

THEORY OF OPERATION
Popcorn uses an LCD UI module and Propeller Platform SD. The only hardware I added was a headphone jack that goes out to a computer speaker. Everything else is stock.

The microSD card holds the code and voice samples as 16-bit mono wav's. Each number has its own wav (00.wav - 19.wav, 20.wav, 30.wav, etc) and so do the supporting phrases (morn.wav = "Good Morning", pst.wav = "At the tone, Pacific Standard Time Will be", and so on). You can switch out the samples by changing the files on the SD card.

One cog manages the screen, updating it continuously, and checking to see if the 5-way d-pad has been center-pushed. Pushing center will enter a time update mode to let you change the time and date. A second cog manages the audio announcement. It checks to see if the big red button has been pushed. If so, it asks the RTC for the time and plays the appropriate wav files.

If you've got a Propeller Platform SD and LCD UI, you can try it out by downloading the code + samples. Just copy to a microSD and turn it on and it will start up. With a Parallax Protoboard or demoboard, you'll probably want to change the pin assignments and you'll need to add a DS1307 Real-time clock.

I like the historical aspect POPCORN. We called it 856-any 4 numbers in socal. 856- any 4 numbers would connect to the same time service yet this stop some 4+ years ago. Shame. The lack of use and old equipment is just the states way of lying. Only takes one person like you to remedy that.

I did a similar project for a frequency and a velocity counter, broke the number into individual sounds and phases, using different chipset. Only real difference is no use of microSD back then, sounds were burned into flash through RS232-USB converter.

These days, microSD is so cheap, small and readily available, it cannot help but gives rise to great projects such as this.

Now it would be awesome if you tied this into a phone number so that people could call and put POPCORN back into service. You would get some 15 minutes in the news and make the state look bad.

That's awesome in its simplicity - a perfect example of people taking control of technology for the good of all. Nice one. Luckily in Australia we still have the "speaking clock" telephone number. Now I'm going to have to get some equipment and make my own Arduino version. Cheers!_________________plenty of fun at tronixstuff.wordpress.com and youtube.com/tronixstuff